New (Dinosaur) Poem: Parking Lot

by | Mar 25, 2023 | Blog, My Poems

Happy Friday, friends! I hope you all have some marvelous plans for the weekend. I’ve been doing client work and going through submissions for Lit Shark Magazine all week, and this weekend, I’m attending the livestream of Mississippi’s first-ever banned book festival to cover for the Banned Book Review.

One of the features on Lit Shark this week was the Wednesday Writing Prompt, and this prompt was about the in-between, what’s missing, when an object is described without a common feature, like a flower’s blooming being described without its blooming.

I thought I would write a very different poem when I started describing the rain, but I found my way into another dinosaur poem that I intend to revise and include in my dinosaur collection, Shopping for T-Rex, coming this summer.

*

PARKING LOT

I don’t remember how old I was when, head pounding & dew
collecting on my forehead, I waited for her to return, only to be greeted

by a snarling dinosaur at my back-row window. A couple had lost
the balloon, only for the string to get caught in our tire. I remember

how they looked at me over its shoulder, & I realize
that other people’s poems about dinosaurs remind me

more of the dinosaurs found in a coloring book or the flat face
of that balloon as it clung to the window, peering in. Freakish & big,

wide jaws, the teeth, the claws. Maybe a fallen feather. They forget
the other things: the way their skin glistens with rain, feathers ripped

from the follicle in a fight or flight, their whale-like and bird-like calls, even
their maternal instincts. One of my strongest memories

from my childhood may be one that does not even exist:
my mother furious and cussing before going silent for days, her foot pressing down

on the gas. How I disassociated from my body & saw our car barreling down the highway,
my mom’s head the only one visible from the other lane, dinosaurs in the field,

chewing with open maws like cows; how no matter far we traveled, they kept up
with the car; how no matter the number on the speedometer, they beckoned

to take me home.


Thank you for reading!

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